Webstock Networks

This all began in 1980 when my teacher, Mr. Mazen brought in his brand new thing called a TRS-80. It was a personal computer. By 1991 I had my own computer, a modem, and one of Central Connecticut's more popular dial in BBS Systems - one that went on to become the very first "point-and-click" online systems in the Northeast U.S. Soon, the Internet became the big thing and I made my first web site in late 1993 and early 1994 - a site that sought out public e-mail addresses of various celebrities and obtained permission to archive them into one location for fans to be able to find them and send fan-mail via this great new technology. This led to doing an Offcial Web Site for Cynthia Gibb (Huzzah for the Wayback Machine!).

It was around this time that I realized that updating large amounts of data by hand was a real drag - and nearly impossible to keep up with. So I began studying information architecture, web programming, and all the other things that went into Rock-n-Reel.com (above in 2002 and in 2005 in the Rock-n-Reel Wayback Machine link). This was all started in 2001, when Google was getting huge and the leading experts were saying that you might be able to get a few pages (without any querystrings) in your dynamically generated web site crawled, but there was no way to get it indexed properly. I read and read. Learned and learned. Yet, they insisted it couldn't be done.

I frown on people telling me things can't be done. So I did it. By 2002 I had anywhere from 5,000-7,000 pages in Google's index at any given time.

I have nearly 30 years of computer knowledge under my belt. On this site, you will be able to find out great information about some of the things I've learned. If you are looking to learn all of these things yourself, I hope that as I continue to put together and add to this site that it becomes a valuable resource for you. Or, if you are looking to hire someone to manage and consult with some of the things required to create a successful, well indexed, search engine and user friendly web site that meets all the objectives you set up for it... then I hope you will consider hiring me. And if it's a job that is out of my range of expertise, then I hope you'll consider allowing me to introduce you to the right person for the job.

A Strong Foundation To Build Upon

Whether you have an existing site, or you are just starting to plan it out - when it comes to optimizing your site for search and for meeting its objectives, you need to make sure it has a solid foundation. Sure, it's possible to come through and get a site/page to rank well for a certain search term. And you can tweak it so it converts well once they hit it. That's fine an dandy... but what happens when the search terms evolve? What happens to the people who are looking for you but didn't type in the specific term(s) that you chose to optimize for?

If your web site - small or massively huge - has a strong foundation in place and the information is organized in a way that it's easy to see how each document relates to another document, then it won't matter as much. It's easy for search engines and visitors to see how one concept relates to another concept in your web site just based upon how it's linked to.

And that's where we can begin to help you...

Now you've got a good foundation, it's built, and all the stuff is in place. Will the people come? And will they purchase from you (or do whatever your primary objective is?) If you have a good, solid site structure, and you have some inbound links - the search engines will spider you. You'll eventually make it into the results, and people will find you. Probably not in droves, but that's why we build from there.

The trick to understand here is that optimization for conversions and traffic are an ongoing process. You have something great that you have gotten set up. You've planned well, you've identified your primary objectives, and you've got some good content that, when people do find it, generates a lot of leads, sales, or whatever else you are going for.

From here, we need to keep moving forward. You need to market and grow. You need more content on your site. Maybe you want to do some social networking and use Twitter, and maybe start a blog. There are lots of things you can do to build everything up - but again, all of this needs to fall into the structure - into the foundation. It all has to jibe up and become part of the architecture that makes up your online presense.

Sure. You can hire someone to do all your SEO stuff. You can bring teams in to track conversion rates. And that's all fine and dandy, but chances are, you already have a bunch of people working for you. You have some sales and marketing staff who is getting the basic content ready to go up onto the web site - but, then you have someone else go through and optimize it for search engines and site conversions?

And maybe you have some people who already blog and hang out on Twitter. Are they helping you? Or hurting you? Or are they just irrelevant? Do they understand the foundation and your grand plan? Do they know the difference between good copy and good marketing copy? What if they did?

This site, and my services can help you and your team get it right the first time so you don't have to pay someone else to go back through and do it all over again. Why pay two people to do things twice when you can pay one person to learn to get it right the first time?